South American Archaeology Seminar - UCL - London -

10th May

The next South American Archaeology Seminar (London) will be held at the Institute of

Archaeology, UCL, on Saturday 10th May 2014 (please note change of date) - see program

and abstracts bellow.

Anyone wishing to attend is welcome but please email Bill Sillar (b.sillar@ucl.ac.uk) to reserve

a place.

You are asked to pay £7.50 towards the cost of coffee, tea, lunch & administration (this can

be paid on the day, but if you subsequently find you are unable to attend then you must either

cancel your reservation or send a payment by post - cheque made out to B. Sillar)

TIME TABLE

Coffee / Registration (10.00am)

10:30am - Alexander Herrera (Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia) Water and territory in the Callejon de Huaylas

11:10am - Miguel Fuentes (UCL) Under the shadow of the Moai: The landscape of Colonialism in Rapa Nui during the period of the Exploitation Company of Easter Island (1895-1953) 11.50am - Sue Hamilton (UCL) Making Sense of an island world: Rapa Nui c. AD 1200-1600

Lunch (12.30-1.30pm)

1:30pm - David Beresford-Jones (McDonald Institute, University of Cambridge)

Investigations at the Mouth of the Río Ica, Peru: A Preceramic Record of Rich Seas, Fog-Meadows, Incipient Agriculture and Shifting Shorelines

2:10pm - Manuel Arroyo-Kalin (UCL) and Santiago Rivas Panduro (Ministerio de

Cultura, Perú) A preliminary report on recent archaeological investigations along the Napo river, western Amazonia

Tea (2.50-3.30pm)

3.30pm - George Lau (University of East Anglia) The ancient Andean things called 'maquetas' and 'yupanas' 4.10pm - Denise Arnold (Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore, and ILCA, La Paz,

Bolivia) Lowland-highland transpositions: The techniques and designs of some bag straps in early Middle Horizon textiles from Moyocoya (Bolivia)

Making Sense of an island world: Rapa Nui c. AD 1200-1600 Interest in Rapa Nui’s moai (statue) construction period is dominated by a focus on its demise. Words and

phases such as ‘collapse’, ‘the island that self-destructed’, ‘ecodisaster’ and ‘disastrous European contact’

abound. There is a tendency to analyse the moai as isolated entities, rather than as elements of a dynamic

interrelationship between people, landscape, places and architecture. The neglected mystery of Rapa Nui is

why the statues were put up in the first place, why so many and so large, and their role in an island-wide

cosmology of ‘constructing with stone’. The presentation will pull together the diverse research avenues by

which the ‘Rapa Nui Landscapes of Construction Project’ has investigated the meaning and contexts of

moai-period construction activities and offers a Polynesian framework of understanding.